Secretary of State for Education following Boris Johnson's election as Prime Minister on 24 July 2019. Following deplatforming of history professor Selina Todd and former Home Secretary Amber Rudd by student societies at Oxford University, in March 2020 Williamson called for "robust action" to enforce free speech codes, and stated that the government would intervene to protect freedom of speech at universities if they failed to do so themselves. HuffPost reported that Williamson's department had drafted legislation to "strengthen academic freedom and free speech in universities". Williamson brought forward the legislation, titled the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, in May 2021. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Prime Minister announced schools in England were to be closed to most children from 20 March 2020 until further notice. He said that exams in that academic year would not go ahead. On 6 January 2021, Williamson announced GCSE, AS and A-Level exams would once again not go ahead for students in the academic year, being replaced with teacher assessed grades. On 15 September 2021, Williamson was dismissed as Education Secretary when Johnson reshuffled his cabinet. Exams controversy In August 2020, he apologised to schoolchildren for the disruption in the COVID-19 pandemic. He said "...where we haven't got everything great, of course, I'm incredibly sorry for that". There was considerable concern over the A-Level results which, due to all exams having been cancelled in 2020, were based on Ofqual-moderated teacher assessments rather than on moderated exam results. About 39% of results were below the teacher assessment (compared to 79% in 2019) – Ofqual accused some teachers of submitting "implausibly high" predictions. Ofqual rescinded the advice it had given on how the appeals system would operate. The Daily Telegraph reported that Williamson had repeatedly defended the algorithm method as the fairest way to produce grades avoiding grade inflation, though several Ofqual board members had come to believe the algorithm method had been shown to be politically unacceptable. On 17 August 2020, Ofqual and Williamson announced that the algorithm method for calculating A Level results would be abandoned, and teacher assessments would be used instead, after pressure from within the Conservative Party and the claim that they had lost the confidence of the teaching profession. There were calls for Williamson to resign, for what The Daily Telegraph called "the fiasco". University admission caps were relaxed, as places had already been allocated based on the